COVID-19 restrictions shrink Labrador judo club from 30 to 6

A popular judo club in southern Labrador is facing a tough squeeze, due to COVID-19 safety measures that left the club temporarily homeless — and are now shrinking it.

Instructor Didier Naulleau has found a new, smaller home for the after-school group, but physical distancing requirements mean he will be able to teach only a small portion of his students to begin the year.

"This is nasty. I miss my judo kids, and I know that a lot of them are missing their judo," he said. "We get constant calls from the parents saying, 'Is judo coming back on?'"

The club normally operates out of Labrador Straits Academy in L'Anse au Loup, but the Newfoundland and Labrador English School District's COVID-19 back-to-school plan prohibits most after-school activities.

Naulleau said there's just no other suitable building in the area that's big enough to accommodate his 30 students.

"I'm going to miss everybody," he said. "It's so hard to make a decision on how we are going to do [this]."

Naulleau's new home, a shared sport room in the Pinware town hall and community centre, will be able to accommodate six students in his classes this year. That means he is getting ready to tell 24 other students they won't be able to return to their training to begin the year.

Deciding who to train will be hard — but tell the others he can't train them will be harder, he said.

"Once you make a call of who you are going to pick, you can realize what's going to happen — [they'll ask] 'Why not me?'" he said.

His plan is to choose six of his most senior students, who are closest to the top levels that he can certify, and work with them to make sure they're ready if they choose to continue their training in bigger centres after they head off to college or university.

"Unfortunately I have to favour the people that have worked so hard for the past five years already, almost six years now," he said. "I want to push them higher, I want to make sure that they are not losing it, and I want to make sure that before they graduate from this high school that they are ready to go to a different level."

Lockdown costs

Naulleau and his partner, Barbara Tracey, said one of the few suitable locations that could accommodate all their students is a building in Red Bay, about 40 minutes away from the school in L'Anse au Loup.

The pair said their experience shows how dependant rural parts of the province are on government buildings, and how COVID-19 safety measures sting in small towns.

"St. John's has a lot more bigger buildings. Here there's only the few," Tracey said. "There's not a lot of options for anybody."

"There's no other building around that can afford us the space to train," Naulleau said. "We have no choice but to understand what is happening right now. The school board had to make a decision, and they can't make an exemption for a club like ours just because."

In a statement, a spokesperson for the Newfoundland and Labrador English School District said there is no plan to reopen schools to community groups during the pandemic. Other, school-led after-school programs will be slowly returning.

The judo club was a big draw in the school of 129 students. Naulleau said that was, in part, because students could head straight to the gymnasium after class, and could practise until their parents were free to pick them up.

Even when the smaller group gets together in nearby Pinware, Naulleau's judo classes are going to look a lot different this fall.

He's working on a concept he calls "air judo," which minimizes contact between students in favour of perfecting breakfalls — movement to prevent injury when falling — and practising moves on a dummy.

"It's like shadowboxing, if you will," he said. "Pretending that you have a partner. The big difference is, you do not have that feel if you need to throw somebody. You need to have that feel that you've got somebody in front of you that you actually have the resistance of."

If his fall class is successful, Naulleau said he'll consider bringing along a second group of six students, to bring his total group up to 12.

"It's going to be quite different. We have to adapt a lot."

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